by Paul Ortiz
The South Carolina Gazette was typical of commercial newspapers that promoted the breeding, trading, recapture, and punishments of African Americans in order to sustain merchant profits.9 Paradoxically, slave owners who placed advertisements in the Gazette to locate their runaway slaves revealed that the individuals they had reduced to private property were intelligent human beings. Refuting their captors’ efforts to rob them of their humanity, enslaved Africans constantly struggled to keep families intact and escaped when possible in kin groups in efforts to reunite with family members sold away or left behind in the wake of sales. One advertisement concerning a fugitive from racial capitalism on the eve of the Revolution noted, “He speaks very good English and is very artful.”10 The cash rewards for turning in fugitives as well as the expectation that white people would offer the authorities information on runaways is a reminder that the minority of slave-holding colonists depended on the vigilance of the majority who did not own slaves to police the system.11
In their fight for freedom, African American communities rejected European theories of domination as surely as their revolutionary counterparts in Peru. Black writers looked to revolts in the Global South for inspiration because these revolutions challenged slavery, the caste oppression of Indigenous people, and the rule of the few over the many. This global vision of human rights was the core element of emancipatory internationalism, and it became a foundation of what Black scholar Cedric Robinson has called “the Black radical tradition,” a set of ideas and practices rooted in grassroots insurgencies that challenged slavery and racial capitalism at its inception.12 Robinson argued that “Black Radicalism critically emerges from African culture, languages, and beliefs, and enslavement. What emerged from that conjunction were powerful impulses to escape enslavement.”13 In the Age of Revolution, Black organizers and writers studied and celebrated Latin American and Caribbean revolutionaries such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Simón Bolívar, and Vicente Guerrero for profoundly enlarging the meaning of freedom in the Americas. The strength of emancipatory internationalism was its rootedness in popular movements, its accessible language of justice, and its resiliency through generations of Black thought and action.14
A REVOLUTION OF GUILTY MASTERS
Given the role that plantation owners and merchant capitalists played in the American Revolution, it is not surprising that a war of independence became a war to preserve slavery.15 The colonial upper class looked with trepidation at signs from Great Britain that foretold the demise of chattel bondage. Foremost among these was the English Court’s Somerset v. Stewart case, decided in 1772. The decision resulted in the freeing of James Somerset, an enslaved African who had been brought by his master to England a few years earlier. The judge in the case found that slavery was not supported in the Common Law. Despite the debate in England about the ultimate meaning of Somerset in England, the decision was interpreted by many white leaders in the Thirteen Colonies as foretelling the doom of slavery in the British Empire.16
Threats of insurgencies from slaves and poor colonists also convinced these leaders that a break with Great Britain was necessary. As tensions escalated between colonists and Parliament, a South Carolina planter, William Drayton, accused the Royal Navy of offering sanctuary to runaway slaves.17 The South Carolina Gazette published an ominous “Letter from London” in the winter of 1775 that accused the Crown of arming “[Negroes], the Roman Catholics, the Indians and Canadians” to put down the brewing colonial rebellion.18 That spring, “a group of slaves, scenting freedom in the air,” approached Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, “and volunteered their services” against their increasingly restless masters.19 Sensing that he was on precarious ground, the nervous governor initially turned the dissident slaves away. By the fall, however, Dunmore reversed course. In November, he issued a proclamation freeing slaves who promised to bear arms against the embryonic anticolonial revolt. Dunmore sealed the Patriots’ decision to escalate the revolt to a full-blown war of independence. Indeed, the third draft of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence listed as primary grievances against King George III “prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us” and, in the next sentence, “endeavoring to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence.”20
In 1775, the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine published African Slavery in America, which indicted slavery at all levels:
So monstrous is the making and keeping them slaves at all, abstracted from the barbarous usage they suffer, and the many evils attending the practice; as selling husbands away from wives, children from parents, and from each other, in violation of sacred and natural ties; and opening the way for adulteries, incest, and many shocking consequences, for all of which the guilty Masters must answer to the final Judge.21
Paine wanted the rebellious colonists to look at themselves in the mirror: “With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundreds of thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them.”22 Paine’s pleas for moral consistency fell upon deaf ears and hearts hardened with the lucre of chattel bondage.23 The English essayist Samuel Johnson wryly observed the ironies of a revolution led by guilty masters: “We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”24
LIBERTY FURTHER EXTENDED
African Americans fought with every weapon at their disposal to change the course of the American Revolution away from slavery and toward freedom for all. In the fall of 1776, Lemuel Haynes, a Revolutionary War soldier in Massachusetts, took up his pen to grapple with Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Two years earlier, Haynes had enlisted in the Patriot cause. In April of the previous year, he and his fellow Granville, Massachusetts, militia members rushed to defend Lexington from British troops. The young Minuteman later served with Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys at the Battle of Ticonderoga.25
Private Lemuel Haynes was a free Black man and a soldier who believed that the American Revolution should be a war against slavery. He was born in 1753, the progeny of a Black father and white mother “of respectable ancestry” in Connecticut who publicly renounced him. Thus orphaned, Haynes was apprenticed to and raised by an intensely religious family in Granville. He became an ardent foe of slavery and titled his rebuttal to Jefferson’s document “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free thoughts on the illegality of Slave-keeping; Wherein those arguments that Are used in its vindication Are plainly confuted. Together with a humble Address to such as are Concerned in the Practice.”26
Haynes opened his challenge to the Continental Congress by quoting the highlight of the Declaration of Independence, its opening sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created Equal, that they are Endowed By their Creator with Certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Haynes admonished his independence-minded comrades that they should be engaged in a war against oppression: “To affirm that an Englishman has a right to his Liberty,” Haynes stated, “is a truth which has Been so clearly Evinced, Especially of Late, that to spend time in illustrating this, would be But Superfluous tautology.” Building on this point, Haynes insisted that the goals of the revolution should not be constrained by race:
But I query whether Liberty is so contracted a principle as to be confined to any nation under Heaven; nay, I think it not hyperbolical to affirm, that Even an African, has Equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen. . . . And the main proposition, which I intend for some Brief illustration is this, Namely, That an African, or in other terms, that a Negro may Justly Challen
ge, and has an undeniable right to his Liberty: Consequently, the practice of Slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this Land is illicit [emphasis in original].27
The twenty-three-year-old citizen-soldier sought to imbue the Revolution with a vision much broader than that of Jefferson’s and his proslavery countrymen.
Lemuel Haynes was one of many thousands of Black freedom fighters who have been forgotten in the story of the American Revolution. The Afro–Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg dedicated his career to documenting Black sacrifices in the development of the United States. In “The Formation of the American Republic,” Schomburg wrote: “The books on the history of the United States chronicle the events preceding the Revolution with fidelity and Patriotic fervor. A Negro reading those books finds them lacking the substance of recording the active part the African has played in the drama that brought to life the American nation.”28 Several years before Haynes picked up a rifle to defend an embattled country in the making, a whaler of African and Native American descent, Crispus Attucks, went to his death battling British Redcoats in the Boston Massacre. Speaking of this rebellious sailor, John Hancock of Boston, a lawyer and a Patriot, declared: “Who taught the British soldier that he might be defeated? Who dared look into his eyes? I place, therefore, this Crispus Attucks in the foremost rank of the men that dared.”29 A brigade of soldiers of African descent from Haiti served alongside the Continental Army at Savannah and other battles.30 By the end of the war, historian Benjamin Quarles estimated that at least five thousand African American men served in the Patriot armies.31
African Americans delivered numerous petitions to Colonial legislatures in the years leading up to 1776 in which they argued that emancipation should be a central goal in the clash with the British Empire. These entreaties reveal the philosophical positions on democracy that Black communities had forged during the Colonial era.32 African American petitioners noted that white Patriots invoked terms such as “liberty” and “slavery” to describe their conflict with England without satisfactorily explaining either concept. These petitions borrowed from but ultimately transcended white Revolutionary rhetoric. African American Framers demonstrated that they had an expansive vision of liberty that did not brook compromise with chattel bondage. Black Bostonians employed a keen sense of irony in their appeal to the Boston Patriots in 1773:
The efforts made by the legislative of this province [Massachusetts] in their last sessions to free themselves from slavery, gave us, who are in that deplorable fate, a high degree of satisfaction. We expect great things from men who have made a noble stand against the designs of their fellow men to enslave them.
We cannot but wish and hope Sir, that you will have the same grand object, we mean civil and religious liberty, in view in your next session. The divine spirit of Freedom seems to fire every human breast on this continent, except as are bribed to assist in executing the execrable plan [slavery].33
By 1776, nearly five hundred thousand African Americans, more than 90 percent of them enslaved, lived in British North America.34 By the end of the Revolutionary War, nearly a hundred thousand slaves had braved great risks by escaping from their masters and seeking sanctuary with the British or Native Americans.35 The historian Sylvia Frey notes, “Severe punishment, and often death, was a virtual certainty for an unsuccessful escape.”36 Benjamin Quarles aptly characterized African American insurgencies in the Age of Revolution: “The Negro’s role in the Revolution can best be understood by realizing that his major loyalty was not to a place nor to a people but to a principle. Insofar as he had freedom of choice, he was likely to join the side that made him the quickest and best offer in terms of those ‘unalienable rights’ of which Mr. Jefferson had spoken.”37
THE DUEL FOR LABOR CONTROL
The repressive contours of the new republic were visible in the efforts made by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson to recapture former slaves who had escaped with Britain’s Royal Navy at the end of the war. Hamilton moved, in a session of Congress, to protest “the British seizure of Negroes belonging to citizens of the United States,” and Jefferson pressed the matter in a letter to George Hammond, the British envoy charged with establishing diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the United States after the war.38 Secretary of State Jefferson was outraged at General Guy Carleton for overseeing the evacuation of North Americans, including former slaves. He argued that this was a violation of the Treaty of Paris, which prohibited “carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.”39 Jefferson belittled the general’s argument that he was compelled by moral reasons to carry out the rescue of enslaved people, and he railed at the great indignities and financial inconveniences suffered by the Virginia gentry at the loss of their property.40 Little wonder that Hammond observed of the former Patriot leaders, “I have reason to think most of them are Tories at heart.”41
The Patriot ruling class designed the US Constitution to protect chattel bondage. As Staughton Lynd notes, the Constitution
gave the South disproportionate strength in the House of Representatives by adding three-fifths of the slaves to the number of white persons in apportioning Congressmen to the several states; by Article I, Section 8, which gave Congress the power to suppress insurrections; by Article I, Section 9, which postponed prohibition of the slave trade until twenty years after the Constitution’s adoption; by Article IV, Section 2, which provided for the return of Fugitive slaves.42
The Electoral College was a check on the rights of ordinary people to directly elect the president, as well as a guarantee that Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe would protect their fellow Virginia plantation owners’ interests for the first decades of the nation’s history.43
Shortly after ratification of the Constitution, in 1779, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted the naturalization process toward citizenship in the United States to “any alien, being a free white person.”44 The Constitution and the Naturalization Act marginalized people of color for generations to come. The racialization and denial of citizenship to entire classes of workers became the blunt instrument that employers used to keep wages low in numerous occupations identified with undesirable African American and, later, immigrant labor.45 The Naturalization Act worked to exclude nonwhite people from the benefits of citizenship even and entrenched racism as the philosophy of westward expansion. Thomas Law, “Washington’s First Rich Man,” explained to James Madison that racialized naturalization was a necessary weapon of settler colonialism: “I conceive that Virginia should particularly adopt every method to introduce more whites & if possible to diminish the blacks. . . . If emigrants were fixed to the Westward would they not combat against Indians & Negroes?”46
THE MAKING OF EMANCIPATORY INTERNATIONALISM
As the embers of the Revolutionary age died out, African Americans sought to rekindle the visions of liberation that had animated them in earlier decades. The historian Julius Scott notes that the next great sparks of liberty in the Americas came from the Caribbean. In 1791, enslaved people of Saint-Domingue, a fabulously profitable sugar colony of France on the island of Hispaniola, carried out an extraordinary insurrection. The uprising was inspired in part by the French Revolution. Some of its leaders had served with the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Couleur de Saint-Domingue in support of the American Revolution years earlier. History’s only successful slave revolution was led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former house servant. The slaves defeated each of the European armies sent to crush their rebellion. Winning their independence in 1804, the revolutionaries christened their new nation Haiti in honor of the original Indigenous inhabitants’ name for the island, Ayiti—much to the horror of US and European slave owners.47 As African Americans quickly understood, and as historians have reconfirmed, the Haitian Revolution was a major impetus for the abolition of slavery and independence in the Americas.48
African Americans throughout the United States comme
morated the Haitian Revolution in many ways. Black newspapers featured stories on the drama, and parents taught their children about the valiant Toussaint L’Ouverture, as well as his generals Dessalines and Christophe. Black communities named streets and neighborhoods after revolutionary Haitian heroes. Students at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia were required to learn and to recite Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s “1804 Independence Address to the Haytians.”49
African American slaves in Virginia and North Carolina organized revolts between 1800 and 1801 that drew on the Haitian and French Revolutions for inspiration. However, unlike their counterparts in Haiti, who enjoyed a decisive numerical majority vis-à-vis their white antagonists, enslaved Africans in the United States were a minority population in most parts of the country. Slave conspirators in Virginia acted in the expectation that poor white artisans would join them in rising against the upper classes. After all, didn’t slaves and working-class whites share the same common oppressor? It was not to be. The plots were discovered and mass executions followed. In the words of the rebel slaves, condemned to die at the gallows, one grasps the grimmest ironies of American history. “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer,” said one of the doomed revolutionaries. “I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”50
African Americans signaled their rejection of the new slave republic’s ideology of white supremacy and Black racial inferiority through words and deeds. A former Haitian slave, Charles Deslondes, led the January 1811 German Coast Uprising in southern Louisiana. The slave rebels planned to seize New Orleans and declare it a free city.51 After armed clashes north of the city, the rebellion was crushed and the participants were executed en masse. A few years later, Denmark Vesey, a free Black man, helped to organize an insurrectionary plot in Charleston, South Carolina. The revolt was planned for July 14, 1822, Bastille Day. The liberated slaves planned to escape to Haiti after the uprising. City officials caught wind of the plan ahead of time, and executed Vesey as well as many alleged co-conspirators who had been members of the African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, which Vesey had helped to found.52